The hope is that this will inspire more LGBTI people from regional, rural and remote communities to share their stories online in either a visual, cartoon and/or animated way. The way the National Institute for Challenging Homophobia Education (NICHE) sees it, the more stories that are told of life for LGBTI people outside of metropolitan centres, the better. NICHE’s motto is ‘TALK, SHARE, CHANGE’.

The challenge is set for LGBTI people and their allies to get working on their own stories. Create your own, work as a group or seek out an LGBTI story to profile in a visual, cartoon-ish or animated way.

The guidelines to be included in the NICHE YourStory Campaign?
1. We’d love to hear a story of an LGBTI person from regional, rural or remote Australian community (or with a connection to such a community).
2. The stories are usually best if they are a maximum of 3-5 minutes long.
3. For this campaign we’d love to see people working together to make something with a highly visual, cartoon and/or animated format.
4. We’d love the stories to focus on LGBTI journeys and how LGBTI people have overcome challenges (suggested questions below).
5. We’re in no hurry (quality over haste) however we’re excited to hear from you when your stories are ready.

We’d love you to share them online: we’ll add the stories over the coming months to our collection so everyone can enjoy them (and share).

In 2006 Daniel Witthaus was asked to represent Australia and join the Global Alliance for LGBT Education (GALE). A Dutch government funded organisation, GALE hoped to see how Western high-income countries and developing countries could learn from one another. The result? The collection, telling and sharing of LGBT(I) stories worked regardless of geography, politics, religion and culture.

The questions that GALE used in its storytelling projects were used by Daniel Witthaus on his 266-day Beyond ‘That’s So Gay’ challenging homophobia tour of regional, rural and remote Australia. They might be useful in your own collection, telling and sharing of LGBTI stories.

1. Tell me about your journey to identity (i.e. LGBTI or thereabouts)…
2. How have you overcome the challenges in your life? (particularly homophobia, biphobia and transphobia)
3. How could you/others do (to improve things)? (e.g. a student might talk about their school or the education system)
4. What advice, if any, would you give to other LGBTI people?
5. What are you most proud of? What are your hopes for the future?

6 thoughts on “YOURSTORY”

I’m terrible at art, so I think I’ll just share my story here. I grew up in a small town in country victoria, about two hours away from Melbourne. When I was in Year 8 or 9, we had a substitute maths teacher replace our usual teacher for a semester. One day in class she decided to tell everyone a bit about her life, and she confessed that her brother was gay. She then preceded to tell the class of young teenagers that her brother being gay was on par with when she had her miscarriage. I’ll never forget being told that what I am is similar to a dead baby.

Thanks Suzanne. We understand that LGBTI doesn’t capture the entire story, and indeed that is not our aim, however we chose to focus on these five letters to be consistent with a range of other projects and initiatives. This is in no way a commentary on whether we think Q, or any other letters, is legitimate, etc.